Category Archives: wine research

Wine Economist reader Rob Meltzer has been searching for drinkable kosher wines (and trying to understand why he wasn’t finding them) and he has been kind enough to share his observations with me along the way. I found his methods rigorous and his analysis fascinating, so I asked him to summarize his research for publication here. Thanks to Rob for sharing his results with other Wine Economist readers!

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During the past year or so, I’ve tasted nearly 90 kosher wines priced between $20-$120 from the United States, Italy, Spain, Chile and Israel. My goal has not been to find the best kosher wines, but rather to determine whether kosher wines exist which could replace non-kosher fine wines in my cellar. From my days living in Northern California, I retain my passion for California reds, but I would prefer to keep exclusively kosher wines. Equally, I wanted to determine which kosher wines I could, with clear conscience, serve to guests in my home.

There are two primary determinants of kosher wines. First, the winemaker must be Jewish. Second, all kosher wines that are served in restaurants and catered events must be “mevushal,” which means that the wine has been boiled before being bottled. If you look at a bottle of kosher wine, you will see “mevushal” specifically referenced. Fine kosher wines exclusive for home consumption can be “non-mevushal.” The “P” next to the kosher symbol denotes that the wine may also be consumed during Passover.

The Search

The methodology of comparison was this: first, my friends and I tasted kosher wines within specific grape types to find the best within each category of grape for red and white. Most of the tastings were “blind.” Food pairings were always the same and the food was always kosher. The “best” kosher wine in each category was then compared to a non-kosher wine in the same category. By way of example, we tasted about ten kosher sauvignon blanc wines from various countries and in various price levels, and determined that Covenant’s 2012 Red C was really most drinkable. Curiously, both the Red C and the runner-up were non-mevushal. (Red C seems to be going for a “hip” level of quasi-kosher; the label read “non-mev” instead of the usual “non-mevushal” statement.)

Red C was then compared to Honig’s Napa Valley 2012 Sauvignon Blanc. However, as drinkable as Red C was, it also did not compare well with the Honig, or other sauvignon blancs we tasted that day. (The tasting also included Domaine Serge Laloue Sancerre (France), Cloudy Bay (New Zealand) and Buitenverwachting (South Africa). The Chilean sauvignon blanc we tasted was so unremarkable it didn’t even make it to the tasting notes.

I also went to a number of public wine tastings of kosher wines. I quickly grew tired of having sub-standard product shoved at me, while the philanthropic donors who sponsored most of these events for charity rolled their eyes in ecstasy over glasses of brownish sludgy merlot at $120/bottle that would never be confused with a 2007 Duckhorn.

Failure and Success

I never did find a kosher red wine that seemed satisfactory in terms of both quality and price for the quality received. We had particularly poor luck with Israeli maker Barkan. Its Cabernet Sauvignon was an entirely undrinkable product. We tried everything from allowing it to breathe uncorked, to decanting, to the magical blender-aeration method, without any success. In fact, several of my tasters told me that Barkan normally tastes like that, and they couldn’t understand my complaint. If they are to be believed, they were regularly drinking something without complaint that tasted like vinegar. Poor quality vinegar, at that.

The best whites were non-mevushal. For what it’s worth, if I were interested in stocking only kosher wines, I wouldn’t buy non-mevushal wines, leading some to question the inclusion of non-mevushal wines in this survey. Surprisingly, the mevushal white table wines which scored consistently high in terms of quality and price-appropriateness came from Italian wine maker Bartenura. Bartenura wines aren’t great, and they won’t be replacing my Napa and Sonoma bottles any time soon. Nonetheless, since they aren’t expensive, they could easily fill out the low end of the cellar quite nicely as a sort of kosher two-buck Chuck. Several of the Spanish cavas were equally good (try En Fuego, as an example of a drinkable Spanish Cava).

An Economic Vicious Cycle

I have several observations from all this. First, boiling wine is never going to be good for the product. Red wines seem particularly vulnerable to damage. The best reds and the best whites were not boiled. Second, the hindrance to a good kosher wine industry seems to be a marketing and economics problem; the percentage of people who drink kosher wines exclusively is very, very small. If you don’t or haven’t compared kosher wines to non-kosher fine wines, you probably don’t know what you are missing and you are unlikely to demand better product. Third, since the available offerings are small, people who really want kosher wine will buy and drink what is offered. Many times, the pricier red wines were found improperly racked at wine stores, and covered with dust. I suspect that the combination of wine-making methods and poor or improper storage explains the poor table experience. I’m also assuming that the boiling precludes proper aging after bottling.

One of the challenges being confronted by kosher wine makers is to find a way to make kosher wines mevushal by some other acceptable heating method that does not damage the wine. While I think this will ultimately solve the problem, the real issue is one of economics. Rather than make a wine that will satisfy the very small market of kosher wine drinkers, the wineries should focus on making fine wines for the broader market, while incidentally achieving the kosher designation. Just as kosher food products are mixed in to the non-kosher product at supermarkets, the day needs to come when Red C is found in the California whites section, not a kosher section. If you don’t keep kosher, you don’t go to that aisle and you would never see or try the product. I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t keep kosher who heads to the kosher wine section first. Enlarging the market should naturally create the capital necessary for experimentation of new methods. There is no reason why a kosher wine should not be outstanding. While the industry is moving toward that grail, it’s not there yet.

There has been a lot of buzz about climate change and the future of wine recently, starting with a New York Times article on Sunday and spreading all around the web. Now there is a video to help us envision the research.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so a cool “fly-over” animation like the one at the top of this post must speak volumes (see this article about the video and the research behind it). As you circle the globe in the video, keep these color codes in mind so that you can interpret the images.

Bear in mind that forecasting is difficult, especially about the future, so projections shouldn’t be confused with fact. But quality wine grapes are sensitive to climate change as this chart from Bemjamin Lewin’s Wine Myths and Realities (see p. 79) makes clear. Relatively small changes in average temperature can have significant impacts on vineyard patterns and, as the video suggests, the impact varies in different regions.

While the dramatic changes you see in the video may not happen, they certain could. And some of the possible climate effects go beyond the sort of changes that might be mitigated by adaptations and innovations in viticultural practices.

First of all let me say that I have nothing against wines that are good values. We all struggle to find wines that pass the “is it worth it?” test and Chile has for a long time been a reliable source of wines that answer this question in the affirmative.

But it is in Chile’s interest to be seen as more than just a good value supplier. So I was very interested when Wines of Chile asked me to participate in a blogger tasting stressing Chile’s terroir. I think that an emphasis on distinctive terroir is just what Chile (and Argentina and South Africa) needs to attract wine enthusiast consumers and clearly differentiate themselves from the bulk wine pack.

The Terroir Two-Step

Establishing a reputation for terroir requires two things. First, you have to actually have terroir, which is to say wines that really are reflections of particular and distinctive winegrowing regions or sites. And, second, you need to be able to communicate this to consumers. Absent the first factor it’s just marketing. Absent the second it’s an exercise in futility from a wine economics standpoint.

Wines of Chile provided us with a dozen wines (see list below) — three each Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir, Carmenere and Cabernet Sauvignon — and the opportunity to participate in an interactive video conference with Chilean winemakers hosted from Santiago by Fred Dexheimer (click here to view the video). I found the video conference to be very helpful and informative — the best yet! — both in terms of matching faces to wines and especially in unlocking details of the particular vineyard sites through Dexheimer’s probing questions.

Listening to the winemakers talk, it dawned on me that the rapid improvement in Chilean wines over the last decade derives from two sources. Improved winemaking is the first factor and the one that gets the most credit in discussions, but increased attention to matching particular varieties of wine grapes to particular sites is the under-rated other. This may be especially true for Carmenere, which was planted very widely back when it was mistaken for Merlot but that now is receiving more specific attention.

Taste the Terroir?

I organized two extended tastings to see if we could (1) detect the differences in terroir by tasting the wines and (2) find a terroir story in the wine marketing materials, especially the labels.

Sue and I were joined by Pierre, Cynthia, Patrick and Grant to taste the Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir and by Ron and Mary for the Carmenere and Cabernet Sauvignon. I was especially interested in what university students Patrick (who wrote a paper on Chilean wine) and Grant (who studied abroad in Burgundy) would say about the wines. Here’s what we learned

The Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir tasting was very interesting. The wines were well chosen both to highlight differences — differences between the Chilean wines and those from other countries and differences among the wines themselves. Our reference point for New World Sauvignon Blanc is Marlborough and these wines avoided the “me-too” trap, presenting styles somewhere between New Zealand and France. Our reference point for Pinot Noir here in the Pacific Northwest is Oregon and the Chilean wines were very much darker and riper — so much so that Patrick wondered if he would recognize them as Pinot in a blind tasting.

All six of the wines at the first tasting came from cool climate sites, where altitude or ocean influences (or both) affected growing conditions. We could easily detect differences between the wines, but I will honestly say that we struggled to connect them to the variations in terroir. Some of the wines helped us a bit by providing detailed information about the viticulture on the labels, but some focused more on the winemaking rather than the terroir. This was a very successful tasting in terms of quality of the wines themselves, but it left some questions unanswered.

The Mythbuster Test

The story was much the same for the Carmenere and Cabernet tasting. We enjoyed the wines a great deal, especially with food (tasty pampeana empanadas), and some wines were even better on the next day. Each flight presented real differences in aroma, flavor and style, showing the diversity of Chilean wines at these price points.

Once again, however, we had mixed results in searching for the terroir connection. Some of the wine labels made a point to provide specific information about vineyard site and growing conditions, so the link between terroir and what was in the glass was quite clear. Other wines didn’t highlight terroir as much as history or winemaking techniques. A couple of the labels were printed in type so small or light that it was nearly impossible to know the marketing message (this particularly annoyed Sue, who is an inveterate label-reader). My trusty magnifying glass got a good workout trying to read the details.

Confirmed. Plausible. Busted. These are the available options on the Discovery Channel’s hit show Mythbusters. I think our tasting panel was a bit divided in reaching a verdict about Chilean terroir. At least two tasters came to a “Busted” conclusion. They just couldn’t find the link they were looking for between the wines and their terroir and their advice to Chile is “don’t give up your ‘good value’ market position.” Most of the rest of us believed that it was “Plausible” that the distinct differences between the wines was due to different terroirs, but the connection was not strong enough or clearly enough explained to arrive at a “Confirmed” conclusion.

If the terroir story is important (and I think it is if Chile is going to upgrade its market position), then the wineries need to do a better job making the connection. I think Wines of Chile has provided a very good foundation, but the individual wine brands should take better advantage of the opportunity to promote the terroir factor. The labels of the San Pedro 1865 Sauvignon Blanc and the Carmen Gran Reserva Carmenere get high marks for their terroir message, although the Carmen’s tiny type was difficult to read.

The Los Vascos “Le Dix” didn’t even try to tell a terroir story — the focus was all about selecting the very best lots and blending them. But it was a terrific wine — Ron’s favorite, I think — which suggests that while terroir is important, it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) the only distinguishing characteristic.

Can “terroir wines” help elevate Chile’s international wine reputation? It’s a plausible proposition, but like most initiatives the key will be execution, especially coordination between Wines of Chile and key producers to provide wine enthusiasts with a clear and consistent message.

The photo shows (clockwise from top left) Grant and Patrick, Cynthia and Pierre, Mike’s magnifying glass and Mary and Ron. Thanks to Sue for the photos. Thanks to Wines of Chile for the wines and supporting material. Thanks to my research assistants for their feedback on the wines and marketing strategies.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded was the title of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s bestselling 2008 book about the future of globalization (Friedman released an upgraded 2.0 version of the book in 2009 — times change, I guess).

Global climate change, the rising global middle class and population growth were the three key issues that he identified in the book, which advocated a “green revolution” that would renew America.

In an interview with Fareed Zakaria (excerpted on the book’s Amazon.com home page), Friedman exlains that

There is a convergence of basically three large forces: one is global warming, which has been going on at a very slow pace since the industrial revolution; the second–what I call the flattening of the world–is a metaphor for the rise of middle-class citizens, from China to India to Brazil to Russia to Eastern Europe, who are beginning to consume like Americans. That’s a blessing in so many ways–it’s a blessing for global stability and for global growth. But it has enormous resource complications …

And lastly, global population growth simply refers to the steady growth of population in general, but at the same time the growth of more and more people able to live this middle-class lifestyle. Between now and 2020, the world’s going to add another billion people. And their resource demands–at every level–are going to be enormous. I tell the story in the book how, if we give each one of the next billion people on the planet just one sixty-watt incandescent light bulb, what it will mean: the answer is that it will require about 20 new 500-megawatt coal-burning power plants. That’s so they can each turn on just one light bulb!

Recently I’ve been thinking about the “big picture forces” that are shaping the future of wine and Friedman’s unholy trinity keeps coming to mind. If the world is becoming hot, flat and crowded, then obviously these forces will affect the world of wine, too. But what other forces are involved? What are the key wine-specific factors that should be considered when looking to the future?

After giving this question some thought, I’ve settled on a trio of trends that are inspired by Friedman’s book and in fact overlap with his list just a bit. Over the next few weeks I’ll explore the the implications of a wine world that is Tight, Fat, and Uncorked. Here is a brief introduction.

The period of low and falling wine prices, which brought so many consumers into the wine market (and pushed some growers and makers out of it) has come to an end here in the U.S. and prices are on the way up. Markets have already started to tighten up and some are close to seizing up. The low price part of the cycle was unusually long (for reasons I’ll discuss in my next post) and the cycle’s tight turn may be long, too.

Tight markets will affect the whole wine supply chain and impact different parts of the market differently. We haven’t seen wine markets this tight in a while and it’s going to be interesting to see what happens.

Friedman’s “flat” back then referred to global competition and the mythical “level playing field” where everyone competes with everyone else. Geography didn’t matter any more, Friedman seemed to suggest, because some smart guy in Bangalore could take your job in an instant by offering to do it better or cheaper or while you are asleep. The book was really a call for America to invest in itself — in education and technology — and the flatland analogy was supposed to motivate politicians and policymakers to take action.

When Friedman says the world is flat today, he means it in the sense of flat organizations. He specifically argues that the rising middle class around the world is a powerful force for change and this I believe is not globaloney, although I wonder if he would say exactly the same thing today, with the “occupy” movement still active and the gap between the 1% and the 99% so prominent in the public mind.

The world wine market isn’t getting flat so much as fat. Even though the prices of some “1%” wines have fallen, there is still a gap big enough for the 99% to want to “occupy.” The impact of the growing global middle class will be very important in the long run. The wine market is becoming “fat” in the sense of being “thick around the middle” — middle class, middle market, middlebrow. That’s global trend #2.

Now Lose the Cork

The cork in question is a symbol of the practices and traditions associated with an aristocratic view of wine that will not be swept away but that will be joined by many other, more “democratic” practices as the era of tight and fat unfolds.

Generational transition, the adoption of wine by new global middle class consumers, the lingering impact of the economic crisis and America’s continuing recover from its Prohibition hangover will all play a part in this story.

Tight, Fat and Uncorked: if this sounds terrible for the future of wine, please relax. It’s not all bad (or good either), it won’t all happen at once or in the same way and it it’s not [just] about the wine.

I invite you to read along over the next few weeks as I try to work out these ideas in Friedman-esque style. I hope to benefit as I usually do from the comments, critiques and creative ideas of my readers.

The puzzle that the article examines is why sugar levels (measured in degrees Brix) have risen in California, taking wine alcohol levels with them. Sugar levels in white grapes grown in California increased 12% from 1980-84 to 2005-08, for example, with the average degree Brix rising from 20.7 to 23.2. Average Brix for red grape varieties increased from 22.2 degrees Brix to 24.3. Sugar levels in Cabernet Sauvignon grapes increased from 22.8 to 25.0 degrees Brix at harvest. Higher sugar levels mean higher alcohol levels, all else being equal.

Two simple explanations are usually cited to explain the rising sugar/alcohol trend. The first is based on changes in demand. Robert Parker (and some other powerful wine critics) are said to prefer a certain style of wine that is riper. Sugar and alcohol levels have increased as wine growers have worked to produce the grapes that make the wines that most please the Golden Palate of Robert P. (or that otherwise appeal to changing consumer preferences).

Supply-Side Explanations: Chateau Al Gore

I call the second theory the “Chateau Al Gore” hypothesis because Al Gore is associated in popular culture with global climate change and that’s what this theory is about. Rising temperatures, according to this line of reasoning, produce riper grapes pushing up sugar levels, boosting alcohol.

It is pretty easy to line up facts to make a persuasive case for Chateau Al Gore. Temperatures as measured by a heat index have been rising in California, according to the article’s authors. Sugar and alcohol levels have increased, too. Although additional sugar may be welcome (the Parker principle), there are indications that producers would prefer lower levels. A good deal of wine in California is partially de-alcoholized, for example. Alcohol is removed from a portion of the vintage (using reverse osmosis or the spinning cone method I am told) and then the treated wine is blended back, reducing overall alcohol levels and allowing winemakers the opportunity to find the “sweet spot” alcohol level for their wines.

Some of the de-alcoholization may be motivated by federal taxes, which increase substantially on a per-gallon basis for wines that rise above the 14% ABV level. The extra 50 cents tax per gallon may not concern the makers of expensive wines like Screaming Eagle, but it can be a significant cost factor for bulk producters and thus worth the expense of alcohol reduction. In any case, the authors find that lower-priced grapes tend to have lower average Brix readings, which is consistent with the tax hypothesis but doesn’t prove it.

If alcohol levels of wine have increased even after partial dealcoholization, this suggests that rising sugar levels must be unwanted and this notion is at least partially confirmed by preliminary data reported here that many wineries under-estimate alcohol levels on product labels. The authors have obtained access to data from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (one of the largest wine merchants in the world), which show that the average stated alcohol level of California wine exported to Ontario was 12.63 percent in the sample period while the actual level was 13.35 percent. The gap is clear, but the authors suggest that more work is needed to fully understand it. I’ll be interested to read their final report.

Ceteris Paribus

The Chateau Al Gore theory seems pretty persuasive. Ceteris paribus(holding everything else constant) it makes sense that sugar and alcohol levels would rise with average vineyard temperature. The fact that winemakers work to offset the alcohol boost and maybe fudge it a bit (within legal limits) on the label suggests that this is a climate change event that they struggle to contain.

But ceteris is seldom really paribus in wine. Employing multi-factor regression analysis, the authors find that the rising heat index is responsible for some of the increase in sugar levels, but not all of it. Put another way, climate factors alone are not sufficient to explain the total increase in sugar and alcohol. Other factors must also be at work.

Which pushes us back to the demand-side Parker Theory, but in a usefully complicated way. It is important to understand how much the California wine industry has changed in the last 30 years. The type of wine produced has changed, for example, with varietal wine (Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon) increasing faster than production of generic wine (“Chablis,” “Burgundy”). Varietal wines accounted for 71% of California production in 2000, according to the authors, compared to just 19% in 1985.

The move upmarket required different grape varieties of higher quality from different production zones. Thus while total California wine grape production rose by 60% in the survey period, the biggest increase (+185%) was in the Delta region (including the Lodi AVA) with the North Coast (including Napa and Sonoma Valleys) increasing by 128%. Wine grape production in the San Joaquin Valley rose but by a much smaller amount. The southern San Joaquin valley accounted for just 30% of California vineyard acreage in 2008 (down from 50% in 1981), although it still produced more than 60% of wine grape tonnage because of higher yields.

So wine grape production has increased and also shifted in terms of desired quality, price per ton, grape variety and growing location. It is perhaps not surprising that average sugar levels would change too. Much of the growth in the California wine industry has thus been associated with the demand shift towards premium and ultra-premium wines and the rising sugar levels are to some extent associated with this “grape transformation” of the American palate. Robert Parker is part of this movement although I think it would be unfair to give him all the credit or blame for the changes noted here.

Getting to the Root of the Problem

So the JWE article finds evidence for both the demand-side and supply-side theories of rising sugar levels. But wait, there is more, including rootstocks (this is the “real dirt” in the title of this post).

Phylloxera struck California starting in the mid-1980s when the supposedly Phylloxera resistant AxR#1 rootstock was found to be susceptible to this root-sucking parasite. Eventually nearly all the vines affected were grubbed up and replaced with vines grafted to different (and hopefully more resistant) rootstocks. Several winemakers have suggested to me that the new rootstocks and associated changes in viticultural practices affect grape ripening — sugar levels peak before the desired flavor profile (phenolic ripeness) has been achieved. Longer hang times are needed to get the flavors right, leaving wine growers with the problem of too much sugar and so forth.

The rootstock hypothesis is beyond the scope of the JWE study, but it indicates how complicated it can be to explain seemingly simple questions in wine economics and how much wine remains an agricultural product after all.

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I don’t think I’ve done justice to this research so I hope you will click on the link in the first paragraph above and read the study yourself.

Alfred Marshall defined economics as the study of people as they go about the ordinary business of life. People who love wine believe that it is special and they are right to a certain extent, but it is also ordinary at least in terms of some of the business functions. Herewith the first of two posts about how ordinary and extraordinary intersect in the wine business.

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Information technology (the bits and bytes of the title) has insinuated itself into almost every aspect of our daily lives — why should wine (the sniff and swirl) be any different? And indeed it is not, although most of us probably romantically wish it were otherwise.

The most obvious place where IT comes into play is in the marketing of wine. Most winemakers today try to use social media vectors such as FaceBook and Twitter to establish and nurture relationships with customers. I’ve read that the hard sell approach isn’t generally effective (readers: use the comments section below to share your experiences with this), so the focus is on soft sell.

But is it worth it? That’s the business question. Yes, it is probably a mistake to ignore social media entirely (just as you would be crazy not to have a winery website or a website for your barber shop if that’s your business), but what’s the smart level of investment? After all, social media doesn’t create and manage itself. Someone’s got to represent the winery as host, posting content and responding to friends and followers. How much investment makes sense?

One big time winemaker friend put it this way. Which is better for the winery — a full time employee to manage social media or three full page advertisements in Wine Spectator? Wow, that’s a tough one, especially since the audiences and the nature of the impact are so different. But, from a business standpoint, that’s the sort of trade-off that must be evaluated.

It’s the same thing for QR codes. Wineries can use QR codes to enrich their story-telling to smart phone-enabled customers, which is surely an advantage, but not without some investment. The old marginal cost versus marginal revenue questions will always be there, even in the wine game.

Cloud Data Systems

Trend Micro sent me information about their SafeSync for Business cloud data system. It provides a safe, secure data storage system. What got my attention is that they featured a winery case study: Good Harbor Vineyards on Michigan’s Leelanau Pennisula.

“As a wine maker, we are highly monitored and regularly audited by numerous government agencies. We have to keep track of everything—every bottle and every ounce has to be accounted for—from purchase through production, bottling, sale, and shipment. We were worried that someone could gain access to these records. Losing our files would be crippling in any type of audit — and these take place frequently.

This made me realize that wineries have all the business IT needs that other types of firms do, and a few more as well. I think it is interesting that a big firm like Trend Micro would make a point to feature winery applications. I wonder if small and medium sized wineries (like similar businesses generally) have lagged behind the IT cutting edge and are therefore a ripe market for upgrades. Or maybe wine is just the sort of example that makes everyone realize how important data can be.

Extraordinary Business Needs

While some parts of the wine business are not so different from any other business (with a couple of special wrinkles in the cloth just to keep things interesting), some business needs really are fairly specific to wine. Every business needs to be able to track shipments and inventory, for example, but wine’s needs often go beyond the norm.

A London to Hong Kong shipment record.

The wine business is large enough to spawn IT applicantions to meet its particular specialized needs. For example, a company called eProvenance has been formed to provide reliable detailed information about wine shipping conditions. Wine buyers, especially those at the high end of the market, now seek assurance of the quality and authenticity of their investments and their concerns extend all the way through the supply chain.

A Bordeaux to Beijing shipment record.

Your bottle of Chateau Margaux (lucky you!) won’t be the same if it has been “cooked” in an improperly handled shipping container, for example. But how can you be sure it hasn’t been? Enter the NFC temperature sensor!

Boston, Massachusetts – December 6, 2011 – eProvenance, a Franco‐American company applying advanced technology to monitor the temperature of fine wines as they travel from wine producer to customer, has developed temperature sensors that are compatible with the Near Field Communication (NFC) protocol and can be read through wooden cases of wine. Using the NFC protocol, which makes it easy to communicate data via smartphones (like the Google Nexus S), the new eProvenance sensors can transfer the temperature history for the case of wine through a reader or smartphone to the secure eProvenance online database. Using their NFC mobile phones, consumers will be able to access the eProvenance temperature history, and thus verify the provenance of the wines they purchase.

As you can see from the two temperature tracks above, not all wine shipments are treated with the care they deserve (and their buyers probably expect), so the tracking data can be very important. And now data can be collected in the warehouse as well as the shipping container for longer time periods, another way to ascertain quality.

With a 15‐year battery life, the new 2G (second generation) eProvenance sensors can be embedded in the wooden wine case to provide continuous, long‐term temperature monitoring, which creates a record of provenance over time that adds to the value of the wine. eProvenance customers can choose either to convert the temperature data into a provenance rating or simply share the data, allowing the importer or customer to make their own judgment about the temperature conditions.

The Opus One Story

Opus One is taking the logical next step in the use of IT, according to the press release from eProvenance — combining story-telling and temperature tracking at the single-bottle level.

Presenting at WineFuture Hong Kong 2011, David Pearson of Opus One said, “Starting with our 2008 vintage, we have an NFC tag on each bottle under the back label, which connects consumers to a video of our winemaker. Now we envision adding an eProvenance sensor inside each case to monitor the temperature for 15 years, allowing consumers with an NFC phone to read the entire temperature history with one click. The potential to connect with our consumers and to safeguard their wine is tremendous.”

I’m not sure if Alfred Marshall liked wine, but I’m pretty sure he would like the wine business today for its combination of ordinary and exceptional business practices.

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Thanks to eProvenance for giving me permission to use the temperature charts above. Thanks to Ken B. for the suggestion that provoked the “ordinary business” blog posts.

I’m always excited to read the final papers written by students in my class on “The Idea of Wine.” The students come from all corners of the university and bring with them a diverse range of skills, interests, and experiences both with wine and with academics and life generally.

Reading these papers is never tiring or boring, but that’s probably obvious. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson’s comment about London, a person who is tired of wine is tired of life. As in the past, I’ve picked a handful of papers from the fall semester to feature here. This time I want to focus on two themes: wine science and wine politics.

Better Living Through [Wine] Chemistry

Alex (a Math and Chemistry major) wrote an excellent survey of “Improvements in Wine Making Through Chemistry” that argued that “In every part of the [winemaking] process there are questions that can only be addressed using modern chemical models and knowledge.” He supported this point with several examples of detailed chemical analysis. I suspect Alex was “provoked” to write this excellent paper by the combination of the anti-scientific sentiment of the film Mondovino, which the class watched, and the very pro-science attitude of Biology PhD and Master of Wine Benjamin Lewin’s book Wine Myths and Realities, which we read.

Two papers dealt with health issues. Julie (Biochemistry) wrote on “Resveratrol: Potential Health Benefits of Red Wine” while Abby (Exercise Science) analyzed “Moderate Intake and the Risk of CVS: Resveratrol, NO pathways and SIRT1.” Both papers took the conventional wisdom of the French “Red Wine Paradox” and examined it in detail through the lens of scientific papers and studies. I learned so much from these papers and I can’t thank Julie and Abby enough for writing them.

Frankenwine and Tropical Terroir

Fletcher wrote “Happy Halloween, Enjoy Your Glowing Wine,” an analysis of what I call the “Frankenwine” issue – the application of genetic engineering to wine. As a Business major, Fletcher was naturally interested in consumer attitudes towards GMO products and the marketing implications, but I was impressed with his more technical survey of the application of GMO technology to grapes (to deal with climate change?) and yeasts (such as the ML01 strain, which has been in use since 2003).

Mike (International Political Economy) wrote about “New Lattitdes” viticulture in “Towards a Tropical Terroir: Winemaking Lessons from Thailand.” Although the Thai wine industry is a work in progress, Mike argued that the technical lessons learned in tropical viticulture might eventually be applied to other parts of the world as climate change progresses. His paper combined science with economics and also politics in his analysis of how the AOC system might make it more difficult for Old World producers to benefit from the technical findings of Thai and Brazilian researchers. Very interesting!

Crossing Over, Breaking In

Two students wrote especially interesting papers that probed wine politics issues. Immigration policy is a hot button political issue this year – it seems to come up in every Presidential candidate debate. Katherine (Spanish and Art History) wrote about “Grapes of Wrath: Immigration Policy and the U.S. Wine Industry,” looking at immigration flows both in terms of U.S. agriculture generally and the wine grape industry in particular. She suggests that the wine industry would be particularly impacted by changing immigration policy

Patrick (an International Relations major) wrote “The U.S. Racialized Wine Industry: Can Latinos Break Through?” We know that Latino migrants provide skilled labor in the vineyards – have they been successful in breaking into the cellar, becoming winemakers and winery owners? The answer is yes, but not very often. Patrick examined the structural barriers that seem to stand in the way and speculated about the future .

Thanks to all my “Idea of Wine” students for their great work, both during the semester and on the final papers. A note to students who have signed up for the Spring 2012 class: the Fall students have set the bar pretty high!

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My policy with student papers is that they belong to the students not me, so I do not post them on-line. If you’d like to get a copy, send me an email and I’ll try to put you in touch with the particular students, who may or may not choose to share their work.